What is BIT Alignment

The purpose of this chapter is to study the effect of Business Information Technology (BIT) alignment on e-Government success in developing countries and all factors affecting this alignment. Therefore, the chapter studies the multiple factors on BIT alignment, such as people, process, and organizational factors. This research discusses some of the possible factors in developing countries with the case study of Syria. Any e-Government project needs all government resources (IT, financial, and human) and not only a single organization resources in order to be able to harness the benefits from all resources to improve an organization work, and this may imply the existence of BIT alignment. Therefore, the gap between business and IT teams seems to be one of the most important factors negatively impacting the implementation of e-Government. Therefore, filling in this gap may help in avoiding the failure of e-Government projects in developing countries in general and in Syria in particular. This case study contains an analysis of related documents and involves 20 semi-structured interviews with senior managers, e-Government project team members, and independent experts from the academics field. This research shows the need for BIT alignment as one of the most important factors that should be considered for the success of any e-Government project. An e-Government implementation framework based on the BIT alignment was developed as a result of the case study of Syria.